Conversation with Louise Fishman

A few weeks ago, I sat down with Louise Fishman in her cozy but austere 23rd Street apartment to discuss her two current exhibitions: “Five Decades,” a 50-year retrospective at Tilton Gallery (September 5 – October 13), and “Louise Fishman,” at Cheim & Read (September 13 ­– October 27). She will also show with her mother Gertrude Fisher-Fishman and aunt Razel Kapustin at the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia (“Generations,” October 13, 2012 – Janury 6, 2013). Fishman talked fervently about her recent residency in Venice, her new wife Ingrid, and how her experiences have shaped her work. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation, which appears in the October issue of The Brooklyn Rail.

Butler: You thought about the residency in Venice for a
long time, and then finally went, and now you have created an
extraordinary body of work informed by the experience.Fishman: It was the most extravagant experience
about painting and being alive that I have ever had, in recent memory
anyway. Going to Auschwitz was another—it wasn’t exhilarating, but it
was intense and had ramifications for years. But this was spectacular.
So I thought, how am I ever going to be able to go back and get right to
work, because I hadn’t before. It’s always taken me sometimes months
before I can get back in. And I walked into my studio and in two seconds
I was working. I was working on about three or four paintings and I was
getting very upset because there was this odd theatricality about them
and there was also, this quality of everything moving up and out,
explosively. And I thought, what the fuck is this? I was very critical
of it because I tend to be very formal. One day I just happened to look
across at this one painting, which is now called “Assunta” and I
thought, what is this? Next to it there was a postcard of Titian’s
“Assumption.” And I looked and I thought, for Christ’s sake, its all
about Venice, it’s all about this drama in these paintings. And it’s
about the sky. So it all came to me and it was a tremendous relief.

Louise Fishman, ASSUNTA, 2012, oil on linen, 70 x 60 inches.

Butler: The paintings made you uncomfortable because they were so different from your previous work?Fishman: They did. I felt like I was losing it. I’ve
never had anything that just sort of did that. I mean, they’ve gone all
over the place but they usually somehow evolve with something that ties
them to the ground. Standing on the floor and having the weight and
movement of your body dictate what happens, it can go all over the
place, but it stays within the confines, not necessarily of the
rectangle but of a certain distance outside of the rectangle. And this
was way off, it was going off into the skies. And I was in a very
exuberant place. Ingrid was now in my life in New York. I never thought I
would meet anybody at my age. I have a Buddhist practice and I try to
be compassionate in the world, so suddenly to have things come to me was
not easy. I mean, I used to get migraine headaches if something
happened that was good. Because, you know, God was going to strike me
dead. That was in my family, my mother was very superstitious, if you
sing before breakfast, you’re going to cry before dinner. And watch out
because they’re going to come and get you. I mean it is something that
as a Jew, coming from a European tradition was endemic. I assume any
outsider might experience similar feelings. So, this was a very big
change.

Butler: So you questioned the paintings, because everything else was going so well, the paintings were confusing and unexpected.Fishman: Now I look at the paintings in the
installation and I see the terrific exuberance in them. They have
everything of me in them, and they are about this very moment….

Two Coats of Paint is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To use content beyond the scope of this license, permission is required.

Post navigation

Connect With Us

Karen Pence is a painter
Yes, Indiana's First Lady Karen Pence likes to paint. Pence told the Indy Star that she studied art at Butler, where she majored in teaching and minored in art. "I ...

Two Coats Selected Gallery Guide / March 2018
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In case readers want to check out some painting shows but aren’t interested in racing around to the art fairs (or paying the entry fees), here are some gallery shows ...

Images: The Independent Art Fair, 2018
This year the Independent Art Fair showed a slew of conventionally good paintings, which is not necessarily de rigueur for the enterprise that prides itself on being the most “edgy” and “risk-taking” of the New ...

Quick study
This edition of “Quick study” includes good news about how the arts drive economic growth and bad news about MoCA curator Helen Molesworth. Also: Grant Wood’s retrospective at the Whitney, Russian collectors' hankering to join in the ...

The Casualist tendency
This essay, which builds upon an essay about contemporary abstract painting that I wrote for The Brooklyn Rail in 2011, was just published in the January/February 2014 issue of Christie's ...

These threads are queer“Let the threads be articulate.” – Anni Albers
Guest Contributor Clarity Haynes / The wall text at the portal to the exhibition "Queer Threads," currently at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in ...

Report from Berlin: Judith Hopf’s idiosyncratic vision
Contributed by Loren Britton / Berlin-based artist Judith Hopf, known for idiosyncratic combinations, is invested in post-painting practices coming out of Fluxus conversations between George Brecht and Allan Kaprow. In her sculpture show ...

Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam: About a painting
Brad Killam and his wife, artist-writer-educator-curator Michelle Grabner, transcribed the following conversation they had about Airport (2015), one of the terrific small-scale paintings that is included in Killam’s solo at Geary Contemporary. The exhibition, on view through March 17 ...

Subscribe VIA Email

Sharing content

Two Coats of Paint is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Contact Sharon Butler via email for permission to use content beyond the scope of this license.